Books: Elizabethan Captain

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH (375 pp.)—Bradford Smith—Lippincott ($5).

Here lies one conquer’d that hath conquer’d Kings,

Subdu’d large Territories, and done things

Which to the world impossible would seeme,

But that the truth is held in more esteeme.

Captain John Smith’s epitaph in St. Sepulchre’s Church, London, where he lies buried, gives Pocahontas’ old friend the benefit of the doubt. Succeeding generations, noting the “impossible” deeds he recounted about himself, have sometimes suspected he was a liar of extraordinary feather.

Now comes Biographer Bradford Smith* with information that seems to give the truth back to Captain Smith and the lie to his detractors. In the past, critics of Smith have only had to point to his autobiographical book of True Travels, a tangle of yarns as wild and incredible as any medieval romance. Author Smith offers strong evidence, culled from 17th century Hungarian records by his associate, Dr. Laura Polanyi Striker, that even the tallest of John’s tales were probably true, and that he was, in fact, not just in fancy, one of the greatest of the Elizabethan adventurers.

A Wet Protestant. Born the son of “a poore tenant” in Lincolnshire, Smith struck off at 20 for the Hungarian wars, where the Turks and the Habsburgs were battling for Transylvania. On the way, he said, he was robbed by some French companions, saved from starvation by a kind farmer, thrown overboard by some Roman Catholics on a pilgrim ship because he was a Protestant, picked up by friendly privateers, whom he joined in an attack on a Venetian argosy that made him, in one swoop, a well-to-do man.

In Hungary at last, he joined the Magyars and executed his most famous exploit after accepting a challenge of the Turkish commander to single combat. At the first charge, Smith’s lance, he says, “passed the Turke throw the sight of his Beaver, face, head and all, that he fell dead to the ground.” Whereupon Smith cut off the fellow’s head and presented it to the Hungarian commander, “who kindly accepted it.” Smith says he made the same disposition of two other Turks who sallied out to avenge their chief, and in consequence got a coat of arms from the Prince of Hungary—and Author Smith, on the evidence, is inclined to believe him.

At the battle of Rotenthurn, Smith was captured by the Turks and, being sold into slavery, was sent as a gift to a fair Turkish lady he calls Charatza Tragabig-zanda. Charatza, Smith rather shyly relates, took a fancy to him and shipped him off to her brother’s castle for safekeeping until she came of age. But Charatza’s brother so mistreated him that one day, “forgetting all reason,” John “beat out the Tymors braines with [my] threshing bat, for they have no flailes,” and took off on the fellow’s horse. Many adventures later he reached London, and almost at once embarked with the Virginia colonists for Jamestown.

For all his boasting in military matters, Smith was curiously prudish in other respects. While governor of Jamestown, he ordered that anybody caught swearing should have a can of water poured down his sleeve. He was shocked, too, when the Indians “set a woman fresh painted red … to be his bedfellow,” and was simply indignant when Pocahontas and about 30 other naked Indian girls invited him into a lodge for a feast and there “tormented him . . . with crowding, pressing, and hanging about him, most tediously crying. ‘Love you not me?’ “

An Imprisoned Mind. Author Smith’s account of Smith’s role in the Jamestown affair does not differ much from the conventional one: even Smith’s enemies concede that, though still in his 20s, hard-boiled John Smith was the force that kept the colony alive. Evidence is given by Author Smith to show that the famous episode in which Pocahontas saved John Smith’s life actually did occur substantially as Smith said.

Smith went back from his American adventure in some disgrace (one charge: an ambition to marry Pocahontas and make himself king). He was never able to fulfill his dream of founding an American colony, not of gentlemen but of farmers and working men. Wrote a contemporary: “He led his old age in London, where his having a prince’s mind imprisoned in a poor man’s purse rendered him to the contempt of such who were not ingenuous. Vet he efforted his spirits with the remembrance and relation of what formerly he had been, and what he had done.”

-Also author of a life of his ancestor, Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony, but no kin to Captain John Smith.